So I've been selling my Canon dslr setup. I ended up putting it on ebay as I wanted to sell it soon for a decent price and have it in a buyers hands before christmas.
Anyway, It sold tonight, but I'm getting a bad gut feeling about this sale.
The buyer is a new ebay member, newly registered with the user id someid61. 0 feedback. When I sent the invoice for the sale, it came up with the name of someone called Paul B(edited for now) who lives on Wongawollan Rd, Beaudesert, Qld, 4271. The email address that the invoice was sent to was to
chandr@sibers.com. This didn't have anything resembling the buyers name in it so I googled the domain sibers.com to find some sort of Russian programming outsourcing company. Red flag #1
I send the invoice to "Paul" and get a near instant reply from someone called Andrey Chashkov. Realising Andrey sounds nothing like Paul, A google for his name returns someone that is a VP Marketing for hirerussians.com. (Hirerussians.com has a link to sibers.com as a "partner" whatever that is). The email address for Andrey is a gmail address,
chandroid@gmail.com. A google on this email address bring up a
domain registry site with that email address being the registered contact for
this website. Red flags # 2 and 3.
Grey pages lookup on the phone number provided with the ebay invoice reveals no result. White pages lookup on the surname and address on the ebay invoice reveal correct surname, but no "Paul" (not that big of a deal) and a different phone number to that of the ebay invoice. Red flag #4. White pages and google maps also tells me that Wongawollan Rd from the ebay invoice, is actually spelt Wongaw
allan Rd. Google street view tells me this particular address is a (nice looking) residential dwelling.
Question: WTF?
Am I about to get scammed? The buyer is happy to pay with paypal (and wanted to pay tonight, but when I started to get suspicious, I said I hadn't had the package weighed, so couldn't provide exact shipping amount until I went to the post office tomorrow (A Sunday). Buyer said that's fine (and didn't pick up that post offices don't open on Sunday?), but I'm concerned that he might pay, receive the camera, then lodge a report with paypal who will take back the payment from me, leaving buyer with money and camera.
I'm going to ring the White pages phone number for "Paul" tomorrow and see what happens. Will also try the ebay invoice phone number after that depending on what happens.
I spoke to ebay live chat and told them all this and they said it seemed suspicious, and recommended that I only accept paypal, and confirm that payment is made before sending the camera off.
Anyone have an opinion on my tale? Am I just being paranoid?
P.S. I think I've done some good homework on this transaction...
